Increasing sales for your retail & small business – the telephone is your best friend!

You can now increase sales, productivity and make your customers happy; yourself included as a small business owner. How? Let us share a few additional findings from our trial customers.

Case Study #1 – up and running
A business (Spa) located in the NYC Metro area had seen a steady decline in business; based on a comparison of weekly and monthly sales compared to the previous year’s activity. This unfortunate decline has been shown in all areas of sales according to industry data.

FonGenie (sm) (FonGenie.com) was introduced to this particular business owner during a networking event in New York in February, 2009. The business owner recognized the dire direction of their sales and was open to try anything that might help reverse the trend. This business got their account up and running on February 21, 2009 and quickly got comfortable with the customizing and tuning FonGenie to best serve their business needs.

FonGenie Call History Graph

Our first case study owner previously had a full-time receptionist that handled all incoming calls to the business—from taking appointments to answering questions such as, “Do you have a website?” “What time do you close?” “Are you open on Saturday?” and a host of other questions that most retailers hear routinely. As the sales started dropping, the owner of the business had no alternative but to layoff a few employees, including the receptionist.

The void left by the receptionist introduced the business to some additional problems. First, whenever the phone rang it would have to be answered by anyone that was available, and often took employees away from their tasks (a lot of incoming calls can be answered by FonGenie without needing to be transferred to a person). Second, it gave the callers an inconsistent voice and constantly had to be swapped to another employee depending on the caller’s questions.

FonGenie User's Interface

The simple user’s interface (GUI) template within FonGenie (above) is where the user types what they want their customers to be greeted with and what the callers can do. You are not recording greetings and menus, ordering new telephone services, nor installing new hardware to use FonGenie. You login and simply type how our services should handle your business calls.

Our service converts the text to speech as naturally as possible without sounding like a tinny robot. This is used to professionally greet your customers and help them get what they need, such as responding to business hours, directions, or just transferring them to a person to speak with.

With FonGenie this business was able to keep their original published phone number (FonGenie does not take over your telephone number, nor will you have to order additional services from the telephone company) that they had been using for just over 5 years, and they were running customers calls using FonGenie immediately and without disruption.

This business owner provided us invaluable feedback on their trial and error tinkering with the user interface (GUI), identifying bugs, and most importantly how to build a better service for retail and small businesses.

Example #1 – improving sales and time management

Communicating and attending to your customer’s questions is an important business function, but FonGenie can also help business improve sales, productivity, and generate additional leads.

What do you remember from your last call to your local Domino’s Pizza? As you recall, the first thing you heard was a simple greeting similar to:

Thank you for calling Domino’s Pizza. Now you can order online at www.dominos.com.
Please press “1” or hold to place your order with the next available customer service representative.
Press “0” at any time to bypass this message.
Try our new American legend pizza, or choose from Hawaiian, Philly Cheese Steak, Pacific Veggie, or Memphis BBQ chicken. Buy a large pizza for $12.99 plus tax. Deep dish is extra (etc…)

Most Domino’s Pizza franchisees use fairly expensive and sophisticated PBX systems to handle their telephone calls and advanced functions—multiple incoming calls at the same time; having the ability to put a person on hold with on-hold music or sales recordings; call transfers, etc. One of the primary features of an expensive PBX system for retailers is the ability to greet customers with their daily specials and up-selling them with pre-packed menus (the choices the caller is given: press “1” for…).

It is in Domino’s best interest not to immediately interact with customers due to the volume of telephone calls: orders, questions about menu items, locations, etc., and to keep the calls as brief as possible.

From a Domino’s Pizza franchisee owner’s perspective the best customer orders would be placed from the special menu that is offered rather than something uninformed or customized. These uninformed callers’ conversations tend to go similar to:

Domino’s: How may I help you?
Customer: I would like to order a pizza.
Domino’s: Pick-up or delivery?
Customer: Delivery.
Domino’s: What kind of pizza would you like?
Customer: Let me have a pizza with Pepperoni.
Domino’s: What size pizza? Any toppings? What type of crust?
Customer: Uhh…uhhhh…
Domino’s: We can have your pizza in medium, large or extra large; deep dish, original, thin crust, hand tossed or Brooklyn.
Customer: A large pie with deep dish please. What are the available toppings?
Domino’s: Four toppings, pineapple, anchovy, jalapeño, mushroom, bell pepper, onion, sausage, ham, extra cheese, chicken, beef (etc…)

An informed caller, unlike the one above, is able to quickly give their order and delivery address so the employee is able to jump on the next order or other task.

Example #2 – tracking and analyzing the sale

By following a similar logic as that which is used by successful retailers like Domino’s Pizza, one of our trial customers who owns a Spa has found a similar way to leverage the interactive functions of FonGenie (this will be fully featured at a later time).

The call flow if as follows:

Greeting: Thank you for calling MySalon.
Post Greeting: (used for the introduction of a special) Today, March 15th we are offering a Seaweed Wrap
for $79 until 6:00 PM. Please press “5” for details.
Menu 1: Please press 1 to make an appointment.
Menu 2: Press 2 for our store hours.
Menu 3: Press 3 for our address and direction.
Menu 4: Press 4 for tomorrow’s special, which includes a perfect massage guaranteed to bust your stress.
Menu 5: Press 5 for today’s special.

The spa owner reported back to us that they were able to use this approach to inform their callers about the daily special which was proven by reviewing the call transactions report—up to 35% of the callers were pressing “5” to hear details about the specials or listening to tomorrow’s specials (by pressing “4”). FonGenie is able to let the retailer or small business owner know what their callers are interested in.

FonGenie Call History

From what we’ve heard, the business owner’s latest initiatives have increased sales by an average of 17% since using the service and we are happy to hear such progress.

As we have posted on the Blog – Limited Private Beta Program, we are looking for additional trial customers prior to the official beta launch and if you meet the requirements shared here, please contact us immediately or sign up on our website!

We look forward to reporting your additional success stories shortly.